Work Text:
"I have to ask you...the wedding band...is it...?"
Elizabeth looks down at her left hand, where she’s spinning the ring absentmindedly with her thumb. Her right is holding a glass of peach tea whose ice melted long before their plates were cleared. Teyla was right: the chilli was the best she’s ever had, and she’s eaten the dish in more than a dozen countries including Mexico. There’s enough spice to warm her through as the dry heat of the day is chased away by an unexpectedly cool evening. She finishes the last of her tea as she contemplates how to answer the question, because Teyla deserves the unvarnished truth but, God, it’s just not first...date material.
"Habit, I guess," she says as she forces her thumb to still. "My ex-husband is a lecturer at the university of California. He left me when I found out he was courting an undergrad. I gave him an ultimatum but...it wouldn't have made a difference if he'd stayed. He's thirty-eight. She was only seventeen. There's no coming back from that."
“I am sorry. I did not mean to open healing wounds.”
"No, it's not...I'm not upset. I'm not even angry anymore. It's been over a year since we separated, months since we divorced. I don't really know why I haven't taken off the damn thing. It's not like I even miss—"
“Ladies.”
Laura appears at Elizabeth's elbow, two steaming paper cups in her hand and the check stuck between her teeth. She places a drink on the table in front of each of them, her blond braids slipping over her shoulder, and mumbles something cheerful around the paper as she reaches into her apron for some sachets of sugar. Elizabeth pulls her purse out of her handbag, but Laura waves her off.
“It’s taken care of,” she says, slapping the check down on the table. She turns a smile on Elizabeth, a little on the raunchy side of sweet and sincere, then winks at Teyla. “You ladies have a nice evening together.”
Elizabeth would ordinarily feel some kind of mortification at the blatant innuendo, but as Teyla shakes her head indulgently at Laura’s brazenness, she feels nothing but a thrill. Teyla stuffs the check in the pocket of her leather jacket as they both stand and grab their coffees to go. Elizabeth drops a few notes in the tip jar while Laura's back is turned, and catches a nod from the bespectacled chef through the serving hatch.
There's a chill in the air as they step outside, and Elizabeth is grateful for the heat from the coffee. She takes a sip and notes that Teyla was right about the beans too. This is better coffee than she'd ever expect from a run-down diner in the back of beyond. She can only see a half dozen people eating dinner through the window, and much like Halling's business, she wonders how the place breaks even if they're prone to giving out meals and speciality coffee for free.
They cross the dusty parking lot and the main road together, where Elizabeth’s car is waiting for her in the courtyard of the garage. She was so grateful when Halling gave her his spare keys, but she can’t help wondering if she should just go, skip this town like she did LA. When she looks at Teyla she finds she’s being watched. Teyla’s eyes are narrowed as she drinks her coffee, and Elizabeth wonders just how much of her turmoil is written across her face. Elizabeth looks down at her paper cup, at the bony fingers of her pale hands. Teyla drops her hand on Elizabeth’s wrist and the moonlight brings out the copper of her skin, an almost ethereal glow from within even with the smudge of oil she missed at the base of her thumb. Next to her, Elizabeth looks ghostly, almost transparent, like she might fade away in the starlight until nothing remains but the worthless gold band on her finger, her last breath lost on the wind.
“I should go,” she says, even though the thought of leaving tugs more painfully at something deep within her than signing the divorce papers ever could. The certainty she felt in the light of the sun is clouded with doubt. Who is she to intrude on the quiet lives of these people? On the generous hospitality of this town? On Teyla’s heart?
“You could stay?” says Teyla, almost a question but not quite. Like she’s hoping for something but afraid to put too much weight on it in case she loses out.
Elizabeth hesitates. “I...”
“If you got in your car and drove away right now, where would you go?”
Elizabeth shakes her head because there's truly nowhere, no one, nothing left that she wants to go back to.
“This place is...I know it does not look like much, but it is a place of dreams.” Teyla lifts Elizabeth’s chin with the tip of one finger. “I would not presume to ask you to stay here for me, but I—”
Teyla’s lips are plush under Elizabeth’s, and for a moment they twist against her in speech, but then she ducks her head and kisses back with a passion that rivals anything written by Sappho or Alcaeus. Teyla is a force of nature, and Elizabeth isn’t used to being so wanted, so desired, so needed; the sheer arousal is thick in the scant air between their bodies, sweet on Teyla’s breath and hot under the grip of her hands. Teyla tips Elizabeth back against the door of her car and maps the expanse of her neck, her jaw, her face with lips soft and pliant, a tongue hot and slick, and a feeling of here and home and always expands in Elizabeth’s chest as she pulls Teyla back up and gives as good as she’s gotten.
Breathless, they part, and Teyla rests her head against Elizabeth's with her eyes closed and a smile tugging the corners of her mouth. Elizabeth holds on and on, ducking her head onto Teyla's shoulder and pressing her face into her neck to breathe in the scent of her skin and the leather of her jacket. Teyla squeezes her and mumbles something into the top of her head, and she pulls back to look at her again.
“Hmmm?”
“I...am not in the habit of bringing people home after a first date.”
Elizabeth is both disappointed and relieved at this. She longs for more of Teyla, her time and her mouth and her body, but she is similarly disinclined to jump in head first.
“That's okay,” she says, but Teyla pulls away from her, teeth tugging at her bottom lip in a gesture more nervous than aroused.
“It is just that...there is something I have not told you, and...well...”
“You can tell me anything,” says Elizabeth, truthfully.
“I have a son. Torren. He is young and I would prefer not to—”
“—not to bring someone back home unless they intend to stay?”
Teyla’s relief at Elizabeth’s understanding is palpable. “Yes,” she sighs, and she drops her head as she picks up Elizabeth’s hands. “Please do not think that I am in any way doubting your feelings, or mine.”
“You’ve been burned before.”
“I have.”
“As have I.”
“So...we take this—”
“Slow?”
Teyla leans in again, and this time the kiss is careful, measured, for all it’s still intense.
“My friend John plays guitar at the bar. If you would like we could—”
“Yes,” says Elizabeth. “I’d like that.”
“I do not want this evening to end.”
“Neither do I.”
The bar is called The Satedan Arms—"Ronon spent some time in the UK when he was in the Navy"—and it inhabits an honest-to-god frontier saloon, which has survived the passing of the centuries by periodically changing its craft to suit the needs of the local population, like a snake shedding its skin. Much of the original architecture remains, though there are many adaptations that speak to multiple refurbishments.
Elizabeth spends some time looking at the photos on the walls; faded snapshots in time that have been passed down through the generations of owners. The building has housed revolutions and rail workers, textiles and travellers. There’s a welcoming air to the place, like the current return to its origins has brought it comfortably full circle, and though the lighting is low and the décor is mismatched, it’s as clean as a hospital and the beer Teyla brings her is ice-cold.
The man that follows her over with a bowl of peanuts and a photocopy of the evening’s setlist is the owner in question. He’s one of the tallest people Elizabeth has ever met, and it’s obvious that when he’s not behind the bar he’s in the gym. His handshake is firm and honest, and though Elizabeth feels herself being sized up, it lacks any sort of hostility or judgement.
“It’s not often Teyla brings company,” he says once the introductions have been made.
“Ronon!” chastises Teyla, but there’s a curl to her mouth and a merriment to her tone so it’s hard to take her seriously.
Ronon raises his hands in mock surrender. “I’m just saying,” he grumbles cheerfully as he backs off.
“He means well,” says Teyla.
“Hey, I like him already,” replies Elizabeth, trying not to read too much into the flush on Teyla’s cheeks.
People start arriving in pairs and groups, and Elizabeth takes in the ambience as the bar fills with friendship and fun, laughter and joy. Many people wave at Teyla and smile at the two of them, but no one approaches their table, tucked in the corner by the window. Elizabeth glances at the program; black and white and written in scrawling cursive, with a hand-drawn guitar and cowboy hat underneath the name John Sheppard. The set list isn’t as country-leaning as she’d expect from the images—there’s some Johnny Cash and Trisha Yearwood and Dolly Parton, but there are also tracks from the Indigo Girls and Candi Staton and the Wannadies. Her heart twists a little when she sees Ain’t No Sunshine near the end—a sudden sense-memory of Simon pulling her to the dancefloor on their honeymoon, heedless of the song’s undercurrent of sadness—but it slides off her easily when someone up on stage starts tuning an acoustic guitar.
John Sheppard is a figure dressed in black, his face shadowed by the rim of the knock-off Stetson on his head. His arrival brings with it a quieting of the ambient conversation and a surge of lowkey anticipation in the air. Elizabeth realises that this is more than just 'a friend playing the guitar at a bar'. It's an important local pastime, and she's inordinately pleased to be a part of it. John starts to play in earnest, and when he starts to sing, his easy drawl pulls everyone into his orbit. That he's clearly not a professional musician isn't important, because the strength of his raw emotion is palpable and contagious.
Elizabeth’s foot taps to the beat of I Walk The Line even as her eyes catch the lingering gaze John has fixed on a lone figure at the bar dressed in a khaki t-shirt and jeans, nursing a bottle of beer and a scowl. For all that the crowd adores John, it seems he only has eyes for one man. As he lifts his head to hit a note, the beam of the stage light slips under the brim of his hat, and Elizabeth catches a glimpse of a pockmarked neck and jaw. She has smoothed enough feathers in warzones to recognise the scarring of shrapnel and the tight shine of a burn, and wonders which branch of the military he served in.
As though he can feel her gaze, John turns to look over to where she and Teyla are sitting, and his smirk is matched only by his wink in salaciousness. No wonder the whole town seems to be enamoured with him, singing songs of love and desire while dressed in jeans that look painted on. She wonders if the playlist was changed at short notice; it feels like the whole town is conspiring to encourage her and Teyla together, even though none but Halling has spent enough time with her to judge her intent.
When the song changes to something a little more upbeat, Teyla stands and holds a hand out to Elizabeth. She takes it, expecting Teyla to lead her to the small dancefloor by the stage, but she just pulls her in close right there next to their table and wraps one leather-clad arm around her waist. It's hard to hear each other over the music and the noise of people singing along, but Elizabeth doesn't miss the "thank you" that falls out of Teyla's mouth, as though she might have denied her this. They shuffle and sway on the spot, holding onto each other even as some of the couples between them and the bar slide into a more energetic kind of dance. Teyla brushes one hand down her arm to interlock their fingers and lifts it to spin her around once, twice, three times, the both of them laughing as she pulls her back in to sway together again, their hands still clasped between them.
A break in the setlist has everyone heading to the bar, and Teyla directs Elizabeth back into her seat as she grabs their empty glasses and does the same. Elizabeth watches the way the crowd seems to part for her, doesn’t miss that she skips whatever semblance of a queue there might be in the chaos, and returns quickly with two club sodas decorated with fresh strawberries.
“I am glad you are here,” she says as she sits and hands a drink over.
"So am I," says Elizabeth, taking a sip. Her ring clanks against the glass as she puts it down on the table, and though Teyla seems completely unbothered by it since she asked about it, Elizabeth finds herself feeling suddenly trapped. "It honestly is just a habit," she says, tugging on the ring to get it past the knuckle of her finger.
"There is no rush," insists Teyla, reaching out to still her hand, but for the first time since the divorce, Elizabeth feels an urgency to be rid of the last remaining chain of her broken marriage. She yanks the ring off and passes it to Teyla who spins it between two fingers and reads the engraving inside. The words are a promise of forever, and Elizbeth wonders if that was a sign she missed—if her ex-husband doth insist too much, and that the ring itself didn't mean enough to him. That she didn't mean enough to him. That she wasn't—
“I cannot imagine how anyone who deserves your affections could fail to see everything you are and feel anything less than blessed,” says Teyla, and Elizabeth realised she’s voiced her thoughts.
“He came by this morning, somehow he thought that I’d still be there when he got bored of her.”
“And you were not.”
“No.”
Teyla drops the ring on the table between them. “That must have been unpleasant,” she says.
“Unpleasant enough for me to skip town.” Elizabeth chews the inside of her lip, and admits, “It’s the most reckless thing I’ve ever done.”
The confession brings back the smile Teyla had after Elizabeth kissed her, spread across her whole face and reaching her eyes. She raises her glass. “To recklessness.”
Elizabeth clinks her glass to Teyla's and they drink to her abandonment of what she's always held to be an innate sensibility. As one, the people around them take their seats and John returns to the stage to begin the next half of the set, which turns out to be light on the dance beat and heavy on the melancholy. Elizabeth isn't surprised she enjoys his rendition of Ain’t No Sunshine, a far cry from the sultry lounge act in the hotel in Florence and a lot closer to the desperation and uncertainty of Bill Wither’s original. As he strums out the ending he draws it out on the guitar, leans into the mic from his stool and says, “Dancers and Drinkers, what say we ask Rodney to come up here and grace us with a little of his keyboard magic?”
There’s a groan from the guy at the bar, which is almost immediately drowned out by the cheers of the crowd.
"John!" snaps Rodney, but still he stands, drains his bottle, and strides up on stage where he repositions the keyboard to an angle that minimises his view of the room. A wolf whistle has him scowling over his shoulder, but the subsequent complement of his ass from Laura as she enters the bar twists it into a begrudged sort of smile. He shakes his head and flexes his fingers as John waits for some kind of sign that he's ready, and then they segue together into a rough-edged cover of Jolene.
Elizabeth drops her head onto Teyla's shoulder, who claps her free hand and runs a thumb over her knuckles. They watch the rest of the show in quiet company, laughing at Rodney's occasional grumbles and John's effortless smoothing of ruffled feathers. They end with a tender song of devotion by Shania Twain that Elizabeth remembers topping the charts some time ago, and the sentiment seems as much for each other as anyone else in the room, the two of them an unshakeable unit. Elizabeth's glad for what looks like their many years and also glad for this new thing between her and Teyla. Teyla kisses her hand as folk shuffle out of the bar late in the evening, and doesn't let go as they step out into the night again.
“It is too late to call the rental,” says Teyla, yawning behind her free hand. “I will berate them in the morning. They will likely offer a replacement vehicle. What should I tell them?”
Elizabeth strokes Teyla’s cheek and presses her lips to her temple.
“Tell them I’ve reached my destination.”